I thought I was just addicted tot he caffeine, but decaf Yorkshire Tea also seems to keep me coming back for more. Is there another reason why tea is go great?
Glutamate has lots of signaling meanings in the body, but mostly it means “prepare for fight or flight”.
Glutamate is one chemical transformation step from being GABA
GABA also has lots of different receptor contexts, but mostly means “chill”
Glutamate is the oldest intercellular signal molecule in evolution. Sponges have glutamate signaling. For sponges it means “swish the water around”, which is the closest thing a sponge had to “fight or flight”.
Anyway, yes. Tea has L-theanine, which is an amazing psychoactive chemical.
For example, scientific studies have found when people take a dose of L-theanine, it increases the amplitude and predominance of alpha waves in their brain.
Alpha waves are associated with “a calm and ready state of alertness”.
Meditation is also found to increase alpha wave activity.
"Decaffeinated" does not necessarily mean "caffeine free," but the amount of caffeine should be significantly reduced to the point of being pointless... Unless you happen to drink a lot of it.
I think most of the answers are a lot more helpful, but somebody had to "well actually..." it.
Well, it's something like 5-25x less, depending a lot on... things.
So if it's poorly decaffeinated, and the drinker doesn't have a tolerance for caffeine, then it still might be noticeably psychoactive.
I know when I'm off caffeine for a bit longer, even a normal small cola is very noticeable. So several cups of decaffeinated tea surely would be as well. More of a compound effect though.
I tried looking up caffeine content info for this particular brand of tea and I came up empty handed. It would have been interesting to know, for comparison purposes... If something like that is even calculated.
I'm the same, I crave tea like crazy. My coworker just brought me some "energy" herbal tea back from Japan which is just delicious despite me not really being sure what it is.